What three things do the following occupations have in common: teacher, nurse, secretary (now called administrative assistant), and information technologist? First, I would classify them all as helping professions. Second, based both on surveys and my own experience as a physician, they all work under conditions of stress, suffer a lot of anxiety and depression, […]
Category: Mental Health
The Chemistry of Stress
Understanding the chemistry of stress begins with an appreciation of molecules in our bodies called neurotransmitters. Dubbed “molecules of emotion” by the scientist who first discovered their existence, Dr. Candace Pert, these are produced throughout our bodies, most notably in the brain and along the gastrointestinal tract. One of the neurotransmitters, serotonin, seems to have […]
Dentist Anxieties? Fear of Flying?
Posted 01/23/2012 One of my favorite books has always been the 1964 classic The Myth of Mental Illness, by Thomas Szasz, MD. A psychiatrist and still writing at the ripe age of 91, Szasz castigated his fellow professionals for labeling too many people with relatively mild emotional symptoms “mentally ill,” especially when it came to […]
The Anxiety in Your Gut
Posted 01/17/2012 “That gut feeling.” We’ve all experienced it, but we may have difficulty describing the sensation. We sense or “know” something internally, feeling butterflies in our stomach, almost as if our entire intestinal tract were a second brain, low on reflective skills but high on intuitive ones. During the past decade an incredible amount […]
Health Consequences of Harassment
I’ve been tracking the health consequences of the recession among my patients. The first group of victims is obvious: those suffering the anxiety and depression that follows job loss, protracted unemployment, living on savings, cutting expenses, downsizing where they live, and, of course, losing health insurance. At the very moment these folks could benefit from […]
Belly Fat! New Research Reveals…
Between the print and TV ads and the pop-ups scuttling like mice from the four borders of your computer screen, belly fat seems to have surpassed global warming as our next great anxiety.
It’s clear these ads are aimed at women, some of whom fall for the hucksterism of what is for many little more than an annoying physiologic change occurring during a perfect storm of dietary indiscretion, genetic predisposition, and stress. As one patient laconically remarked, “My divorce from hell took a solid year. I finally got rid of him, but in the process…” (patting her tummy with both hands) “I got myself…this!”
Obsessing Over Regrets
We each have our own personal stash of regrets, and when they surface our language trends to the elegantly named counterfactual conditional phrasing: “If only I had married Bob, I would have been happy.” Well, you didn’t marry Bob (instead you married The Jerk), and in any case there’s no guarantee Bob isn’t his own brand of jerk.
Stress Less: Meditation
Meditation is the simplest relaxation technique to explain and by far the hardest to master.
Money and Happiness
“Money won’t make you happy.” A boring cliché, hammered into our heads by our moms since that gleeful afternoon when we showed her our first day’s profits from the lemonade stand. We still try our best to believe it, but secretly we don’t. In our hearts we’d like–just once–to be tested with wealth.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger
I recently listened to the sociologists-epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett discussing their book The Spirit Level on NPR. A few days later, they were on Book TV and soon I was reading a lengthy piece on them in the London Review of Books. The publicity worked and I bought the book. By the way, a spirit level is the same as a bubble level, the carpenter’s device containing a bubble in liquid to ensure whatever’s being constructed is plumb.
Do I Really Need My Antidepressants?
A patient I’ll call Schuyler, 31, had been using one antidepressant medication or another for more than four years and wanted to stop. As I mentioned last week, getting off prescription drugs is a fairly common reason people make appointments with us at WholeHealth Chicago.
Holiday Stress Rx: Ten Tips
December is a stressful month, especially for women and despite all the holiday cheer.
Some of you might be thinking “But he’s Jewish–what does he know about Christmas stress?” Here are my credentials: I’ve been married for many years to a Christian woman and I’ve watched as she and our extended family become fried by the stress during every holiday season. Also, my patients tell me the holidays stress them, period.
A SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) Time of Year
Although H1N1 along with our annual “regular flu” are rightfully grabbing the headlines these days, now that it’s October we need to brace ourselves for the annual epidemic of seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
Learning to Say No
Click here for the Health Tip link. I have a group of chronically stressed patients who share one characteristic: their utter inability to say the word no, as in “Sorry, but no, I just don’t have time for that.” This group can be recognized by their fixed smiles, even as they’re relating stories of stress-related […]
Walking Away From Chronic Stress (and Three Useful Herbs)
Today I’m going to skip over the obvious suggestions: meditation, yoga, self hypnosis, biofeedback, relaxation recordings, and regular exercise. They’re all undeniably useful tools to alleviate the stress of your Cuisinart existence (picture yourself trying to avoid those spinning blades). I’m also going to skip over psychotherapy, another extremely good approach to chronic stress. A […]
How Stress Shortens Your Life (And What To Do About It)
Click here for the Health Tip link. If you’ve ever been curious about how your body “feels” when challenged by relentless stress, consider this experiment. Obviously, I don’t recommend you try it. Like the car ads on TV say, “Do not attempt this. A professional is driving a closed course.” I’m asking you to think […]
Women in the Asylum
Posted 06/09/2009 I’d wanted to see The Walls, the new play now having its world premiere at Steppenwolf Garage Theatre, for both personal and professional reasons. Chicago playwright Lisa Dillman and the members of Rivendell Theatre Ensemble have created a dramatic and troubling work about women as victims of involuntary psychiatric hospital admission, once called […]
SAMe (S-adenosylmethionine)
SAMe (pronounced “sammy”) is short for S-adenosylmethionine, a molecule that the body continually produces to fuel numerous vital body functions. Discovered in 1952, the popularity of SAMe has soared recently with talk of its ability to ease depression as effectively as prescription antidepressants. (Proponents say SAMe also works faster than antidepressants and with virtually no side effects.)
Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone manufactured and released into the bloodstream by the pebble-size pineal gland nestled deep within the human brain. Surprisingly, scientists only became aware of melatonin’s presence in 1958. Children tend to excrete large amounts of this hormone, while older adults produce relatively little. But individual levels of melatonin vary widely. About 1% of the population naturally has quite low levels, while another 1% has levels 500 times above the average.
Stress
An interesting transition in any primary care physician’s career occurs when he or she realizes that the real culprit filling up the office every day is stress. It’s not “disease,” like you’re taught at medical school. In fact, people under age 65 are remarkably free of disease these days. So why the waiting room crowds complaining about headaches, skin rashes, back pains, colds, stomach distress, insomnia? Of course, all these people undergo “tests” to rule out the diseases they’re worried about. The results are routinely normal. So you, the doctor, having to do something, write out a prescription for medication to mask the symptoms. Years later, tired of fighting off decades of unrelenting stress, the body falls prey to real ulcers or genuine heart attacks.